Comment by duckfruit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duckfruit | Hacker News Reader

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I have an X1 Carbon from work. Overall an OK windows laptop, but man does the eink(?) touch strip thing suck. While I think that the Macbook version will be far superior, I hope they manage to solve its glaring shortcomings. Some observations:

1. Questionable utility. Sure, there's an icon for 'copy' and 'paste', but I cannot imagine it being easier for anyone to hunt along a non tactile touch surface located in an awkward position to hit that icon rather than just using Ctrl + C (or the mouse, which you've just made your selection with). That's a shortcut almost everyone knows.

2. Poor/Non-existent third party software support. Basically works for IE and Windows Explorer and that's it.

3. Software that drives the screen is poorly made and crashes occasionally.

4. The strip is a 2 bit/pixel B&W screen that is hard to read and is not backlit.

That X1 touch strip sucked enough that they took it out of the very next model I was holding off buying my X1 until I confirmed it didn't have that strip. Not being able to tell where the keys are without looking is bad for professional users - it splits your attention from the screen where your work is, and the tool you use to do your work.

Function-key shennanigans reminds me of an apple laptop from years and years ago, well before the unibodies came out, where the function keys were hard up against the screen - hit a function key, and you bang your fingers against the screen (well, most of the time).

With Apple's version you're bound to wonder how you ever got by with a mere keyboard and mouse.

Every personal computing device is either a) a rough prototype for some Apple product or b) a shameless knockoff of one. The Carbon touchstrip was the former.

It seems likely that the sort of thing you would put on such a key would be better served by either a spot on a tool bar preferably with an actual textual label not a cute icon or a physical button .

The former is visible without looking down at your hands the latter is easy to press. I believe this combines the worst of both worlds.

I don't know how to address your last sentence it sounds clever but it means virtually nothing. If apple does it first its a knockoff if someone else does it first its a rough prototype of something apple will ultimately do better. Heads I win tails you lose?

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